Our little tragedy.
If this were an opera, I knew, it would end with my being forced to play the role I had vowed not to play as the audience reflected on the hubris of my vow.
Victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat.
Before I could ever hope to fear that an opera role would control my life if I took it up, I feared this role already controlled me, choosing me before I chose it, as if the opera hid some god of the ancients inside it, determined to make me his plaything. This was no punishment, no price to be paid, this hand was not my mother’s God, nor her ghost, nor did it seem providential—the spiritual mechanisms I knew or feared previously were not engaged here. This was something else altogether, determined and intent on its own satisfactions.
Whatever the tenor wanted from me by way of making me his Leonora, on stage with him or in life, it seemed all of this was a mask for some other force now grinning out from behind him.
I had gotten more than Fate’s attention, then—I was its plaything.
It is a peculiar thing to reach this conclusion, that a god has taken your life in hand. The sensation is not what people might imagine; it is not magic, nor is it a haunting, nor is it a miracle—there’s no storm of roses, no whistle that can put a raging ocean to sleep, no figure in the mirror besides your own. Instead, the terms are stark. You may or may not leave with your life. You sense your world changed into a stage set for something done to teach only you. You do not feel mad, only very alone, for the scale of the event is so ridiculous no one else will believe you and so no one else will help you—and to say aloud what you are going through will sound like madness, and your god wants this. Your god wants you to be abandoned by all others, for your god has done this so he can be alone with you, and he is waiting.
But even then I knew, as puny as you are, your one consolation, should you be chosen by Fate, is that the god who chose you will feel the need to speak with you at the end.
No god teaches a lesson without this.
All of this, of course, is a prelude to some final transformation, one that begins in earnest once you push away thoughts of lessons and gods and their desires, and tell yourself you are mad to believe it and thus place yourself the more firmly in its grasp. But this last I did not yet know, and so I told myself I was mad to believe any of it, to even think of it, and I opened the window as if, in doing so, I could let all of these thoughts out.
The wind came in instead, so fiercely that the fire guttered behind me and the wind and sudden smoke together conspired and brought more tears to my eyes, but this time I let them stay—the wind slammed the shutters against the walls and threatened to shatter the glass if I let go for even a moment. The noise was such that I feared someone would come to see what the matter was, and yet I hoped they would not, for now I gave in and fully wept. There was a pleasure to it, even to the wind blowing through my suite, the smoke, and the banging shutters—all of me, for a moment, aligned, was honest, an emotion and my reaction matched. This consoled me, and as I sank into it, I found the grief beneath it, submerged until now, some deeper colder current underneath.
The woods below beckoned. They looked as if they led all the way to those other woods—as if, were I to enter, I could follow them and emerge on the other side of that mountain in that other garden, that last night in Compiègne—where I could slip down the days between now and then as if they were the backstairs to the world and to time itself, where I might find my composer coming on his way here to my window. Drawn in by the same power that had put me here, until he stood, below my window, in a salute.
How we all want to be Leonora. To go to the garden and find the love we thought lost to us singing his way out of the dark, having survived the war.